Exclusive Look at LinkedIn’s 4 New Dynamic Filters
LinkedIn’s been busy.
I don’t know about you, but I have always wondered what LinkedIn was going to do with all of the deep/rich data they capture with every profile that is created on their site.
With the release of 4 new dynamic search refinements that are now available to users of LinkedIn’s Recruiter and Recruiter Professional Services, we gain some insight.
LinkedIn contacted me last week and gave me the honor of an exclusive sneak peek into what users of their 2 premium recruiter offerings will be able to take advantage of to quickly find more relevant candidate search results.
LinkedIn has definitely been busy, and they apparently appreciate the value of human capital data – maybe as much as I do. 
Data = Intelligence!
With every LinkedIn profile that is created, valuable candidate and company data is captured, including overall years of employment, years of experience with most recent employer, and years of experience in most recent role.
LinkedIn is able to harness the latent power of this kind of information, and they refer to this as “derived data.” That’s because when people create LinkedIn profiles, they are not prompted to directly produce this data. However, LinkedIn is able to derive/calculate it from the information people enter into their career history because the data is there.
This isn’t too dissimilar to resume parse, search, and match applications that “derive” current employer, years of experience, and most recent experience from resumes when they deconstruct them through the resume parsing process and subsequently make this data specifically searchable.
LinkedIn’s 4 New Dynamic Search Filters
What users of LinkedIn’s Recruiter and Recruiter Professional Services offerings now have the ability to do is dynamically refine search results by:
Overall Years of Experience
Years at Most Recent Company
Years in Most Recent Position
By Group (coming really soon!)
What’s the Big Deal?
Sourcers and recruiters know that the ability to search for people with a minimum years of experience is a very nice feature. When the position you’re sourcing and recruiting for requires a minimum of 10 years of experience, sifting through all of the search results of people with less than 10 years of experience is essentially a waste of time. If you need 10 years of experience – you should only get people with 10+ years of experience.
Also, it’s very convenient to be able to refine search results by people who have been in their most recent position for a specified period of time. This feature can help sourcers and recruiters avoid (if they so choose) profiles of people who have been in their most recent position for less than a year.
Have a hiring manager or client that doesn’t like job hoppers? LinkedIn’s got your back. Now you can search for people who have been at their most recent employer for a minimum period of time that you can specify.
I know I’ve had my fair share of clients/managers who did not hesitate to tell me they preferred candidates who’ve been with their employer for 3-4 years or more. If you have access to either of LinkedIn’s 2 Recruiter offerings, now you can target these people with the click of your mouse. That’s cool!
X-Ray searching
What’s that? “So what?” you say?
Yes, you can search LinkedIn for free using a free account. However, you’re limited to viewing the names of those people who are in your network, and you won’t have access to the 4 new Dynamic Search Refinements.
Yes, I also know that any sourcer/recruiter worth their salt can search LinkedIn for free using Internet search engines such as Google to X-Ray and view any public profile.
But that ability comes at a price. The price is paid in the form of more false positives and imprecise results that come from the intrinsic inability to execute very targeted searches when searching unstructured data.
With X-Ray searching, you’re unable to control current company, exact location (beyond a 50 mile radius metro area), reliably control current titles. With X-Ray searching, you’re also unable to refine your search results by overall years of experience, years of experience with most recent employer and in most recent role.
Do You Really Need a LinkedIn Recruiter Account to Extract Value from LinkedIn?
Of course not.
However, those with LinkedIn Recruiter access will essentially have a competitive advantage over those who do not in that they can more precisely target candidates with specific career histories. The sword they use to slice and dice human capital data will be sharper than those used by people who subsist on searching LinkedIn for free. Premium users will be able to extract more value from LinkedIn more quickly, and more precisely than those searching LinkedIn for free.
Remember, the value of data (in this case, human capital data) lies not in the data itself. Simply having access to data is not enough – this is something that people who claim sourcing is dying or dead don’t really understand.
Extracting value from data is directly tied to the ability to quickly find exactly what you want – retrieve highly relevant search results that closely match the intent of your search (not just the search terms – there’s a big difference!).
And these 4 new dynamic search refinements from LinkedIn help you do exactly that.
What the Future Holds
I have a feeling that these 4 new dynamic search refinements are only the beginning of what LinkedIn is planning to with the data they have on hand. I can only imagine the possibilities – and I can think of a few that are quite exciting!
Disclaimer:
I don’t have a LinkedIn Recruiter account, nor was I compensated in any way for this article. LinkedIn didn’t even ask to proof/approve this post before I published it, and for that unconditional extension of faith and trust, I sincerely thank Esteban and Francois!
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It’s a big so what. LinkedIn needs to do a lot more with the data they have stored in their databases.
For Mark Fidelman:
What do you mean by “do a lot more with the data”?
I wrote about it recently here: http://www.seekomega.com/2009/11/what-is-going-on-with-linkedin.html
i have a LIR account & <3 it. my favs so far are;
* project folders
* pdf presentation & csv reports
* bulk inmails
oh & it's nice to [basically] have the entire 45 million in my "first degree" when i'm searching
Jer
you ever notice the ux design flaw wherein when u drill into a profile on LIR they show how ur connected and have to scroll through 5 pages of hyperlinks before seeing the persons summary/work history, etc … its lame
ps. i LOVE these features about LIR:
* can see the entire db now / inmail them in bulk w/ templates (spam tastes gewd)
* project folders & pdf/csv reporting (very yummy)
* the new UI is very web 2.0 (compared to the original li)
I have had a paid account for the last 5 years. Yes, you can x-4ay and that is nice.
I did notice yesterday that there are advantages to having a paid account with a substantial searchable reach that you can expand significantly in the right direction with just a touch of “seeding”.
This “sword” is pretty sharp, but I’ll sharpen some of the others through the Black Belts sage wisdom.
huge CONS of using LIR:
1.) you cannot link up with people
2.) you have to burn an inmail to contact someone you are connected with
3.) the phone #’s are not pulled into the reports you are paying for
LAME
Jer,
I had a demo of LIR, but I did not think to ask about the ability to link with people from the corporate account – thanks for clearing that up, as well as having to use an inmail to contact someone through LIR who you’re connected to personally. I agree – that’s LAME.
Let’s hope that people do not discount people that have been in a position for less than a certain amount of time when they have been with the same company for many years… I see this is a potential issue.
Mike – I agree with you. I find quite a few sourcers and recruiters are unnecessarily discriminating when it comes to the amount of time people have spent in positions – especially if they have been with the same employer for many years. I think that’s one of the down sides of making data-based decisions, rather than simply picking up the phone and making a call to actually engage candidates to find out more about them rather than making assumptions based on their profile or resume.
I have been an avid fan of LI since the beginning (2004) and have had both a paid account and currently work as a free user. I will refrain from commenting on the pros and cons of the new features because the other limits of LI have become a hurdle to continuing on the system. What could block a power user of a system they love? The ridiculous limit of 3,000 invitations! For the act of bringing a couple of thousand members to their system, LI has rewarded me (and many others) by eliminating my ability to connect any further! I wonder if Facebook operates with this same limited vision? This limit seems to cut off the LI nose just to spite their face.
Although I wouldn’t be happy about switching back to a paid account, an unlimited invitation environment would certainly be something I cannot do for free.
I used LinkedIn Recruiter when I was at Salesforce. It is useful, and gave me leads on quite a few candidates. However, using their premium service, I am struck by: 1) How slow the web pages load 10 Seconds or more for me. And really lousy UI design and workflow 2) I can’t invite more people. I have over 2700 connections, and am tapped out on invites. 3) Low hit rate. Lots of people have profiles. Very few are actively looking. Hotjobs, Dice, etc have much better % of people who are actually open to changing job
But a great blog posting!